To Drift On the Waves
by Aiko Isari
Summary: I'm not doing a very good job at being a monster in a fairy tale. Decode, slight AU, pre-canon. OC.
_Warnings: Depression, implied childbirth, implied possession, suffering, trauma, etc, because I'm running out of specifics._

* * *

I want to live.

Since the failure of my birth, I've always thought that. Since the failure of my own self, since I was aware it _was_ a failure, I have thought that. I suppose it's my version of ' once upon a time'. The longer I'm here, the more vague it all becomes.

The Digital Sea has only one limit: the universe we reside in. That determines its invisible boundaries, That determines how long it will take for me to reach the end and start again. I don't know how many times I have done that. I don't remember the edge of the water very well. It likely leads to somewhere else, to a patchwork place called hell. If I've been there, I would probably not have left. But I'm not sure.

I drift here and I don't remember.

I've been here so long that I don't look like a baby anymore. I don't have a body, of course. Bodies can't survive in the sea without a force protecting them. That's why transitions must be quick and without hesitation if you are a living breathing person. Otherwise you will die within days or weeks, more of isolation than food or drink. You don't have to eat in the sea. I'm sure you can, but you'd have to be an odd type of creature to do it.

I don't know how old I look or am. I'm probably ancient. I'm probably dust to a human dweller, someone in old ruins that people have already privatized and used for commercialism. I shouldn't even know what that means. I am cynical.

Though, I suppose my desire to live would cause that. After all when you find you have no lows you can't sink to you realize you aren't as great of a person as you had originally thought.

Still, that doesn't mean I won't take my chance. I am a monster now, after all. I've only survived this long because I clung to something else. I helped make a form for myself with its power. It's a very weak thing. I had to let go of it when I was done.

Forms and bodies aren't the same thing. Did you know that? It's why most people's souls show up like small orbs of light on TV. They can't form anything without an influence. It's rather inconvenient. I don't recommend it. But I've made my form from this fragment of a program. So now I look like who I might have been.

God I'm really boring, aren't I? I shouldn't try talk to god. She's too busy grieving to hear me.

Can you play with a deck of cards between dimensions?

I thought about this and for the first time in a long while, I heard a sound. I turned my head. Most of the time, there wasn't sound in this place. There were voices but they did not rely on the trembling of air unless you were in a safe pod or path floating through the dimension. So to hear this voice, and so far from me, well, it made me curious. So I flew to look for it.

Let no one tell you otherwise: you cannot swim in the Digital Sea. You can only fly.

So I flew to the sound and found… a baby.

Well, a baby soul. It couldn't make any movements, couldn't give a rough form. Around it though, on it, was a purple glow. Purple was perseverance. A purple soul. Was it like red ones, like my brother? Would it… maybe be able to survive here, like me? Would I have a friend here? Would I have a little sister?

But why would a baby soul be here? I wasn't born in a normal place, to a normal mother, so it made sense for my soul to float away like it had. But this… wasn't this an ordinary child? I hesitated for a very long time and then reached out to the soul, trying to see what it had within it. This was a skill born of curiosity, I've had a lot of time to figure out what I can and can't do.

As soon as we touched, however, something tugged me away. Another voice, human, _alive_. It tugged at me through the child.

Ah… I see. The mother is in here. If I left the child, I could find her. Perhaps she would still be there if I hurried. The soul was doomed. Unless it was stubborn, it was more than likely doomed. My soul was white and red. It was the only reason I could stay here.

If I left, I wouldn't see the soul again, more than likely.

Hah. What did I care?

I pressed my fingers to its light, like a kiss. "I'll see what I can do," I told it.

After all, even if was temporary, a body could be useful. Even like that, a dying person's body…

I could use it to get out.

* * *

I found her pretty easily. A body in a malleable world sticks out like a sharpened pencil in a pencil case. She was coiled around her protruding belly, protecting a life that was already gone… or… wait. I squinted and blanched. This was… was she giving birth? To a stillborn ba-… no, not like this. This woman had the unluckiest life in the universe. Thrown in the Digital Sea and giving birth to _twins_.

It almost made me feel sorry for her.

I exhaled, more because I could do it than anything else, and shut my eyes. My mother's life, my mother's power, had been geared towards motherhood, towards nature. It was possible I could at least keep her alive. It was possible I could make a safe space for her to birth the baby. But it'd be temporary. And they would all still die. Would it be worth the energy?

Well, that one soul had clung on. So maybe, these three together, they'd all have the strength to survive in here, to pass through a border and… well, I dunno what would happen there.

I grimaced and bit my lip. _Mother… Mama… please help me with this, if you can't do anything else._

When your mother was a god, you started not to expect much except for emergencies, and she probably hadn't heard me anyway.

Still I shut my eyes and think. I think of the memory of a song because I've never sung before. I've never been sung to before. Music has never been able to touch me much. It was mother's favorite thing too. So I reach in and find the tune and I'm off, thinking of cubism, thinking of air pockets and safe spaces, floors that can absorb blood and placenta and things that can save her. Birth inside the sea of death was such an irony and it hurt. In that space there would be sound. Still, it would take time to hear it.

I decided to go back for the baby.

The only problem was that they weren't there.

My luck was worse than I thought, but not nearly as bad as that baby's. Where ever it was, it would take me about as long to search for it as it would for other babies to be born. That woman might be dead by then.

Then again, if I was right and the babies would power her up and help me, she would die if I _didn't_ do this.

Why was being a villain so difficult? All those stories made it look easier to be a hero. You had to qualify or you would be redeemed. Heroes just needed a single good deed. Villains needed to mire in their evil.

I sigh to myself and go on.

It's not like I have anything better to do. My last company fell away long ago.

* * *

At some point, I feel a tug. A tug. I almost laugh. Of all the storybook cliches, this is the one that I get. The soul tug, the connection to another life. The connection to someone I didn't know or really want to know. Did I look like someone who belonged with strangers to you? Who got along with them, no less?

If I follow the tug though, I might find the baby. So I go. The tug is purple, I realize after some drifting. I know I'm right. I really hate being right the further I go. Every sea has its deepest points, its darkest trenches. This soul is falling further down in.

Think of it like a black hole in space. The only difference is that you know something is down there, a lot of somethings. Many of them have tentacles. Some have no form whatsoever. I've seen them and they are things I have never wanted to see again, or to ever see me. And somehow a baby was down there. The tug had not faded, and there was no sound, but the soul was down there.

I thought I could hear it.

I haven't cried since infancy, but I could feel the tears right now.

* * *

The void sea fills with color the deeper I go. I don't have to hold my breath, but it would give me a different reason to have the dread in my body trying to pull me away.

A lot of souls reach a trench. No soul reaches the bottom. How do I know? Isn't it obvious? No residue floats back up. There's no hint that soul even existed. At least, that is what I've seen over all this time.

In this trench in particular, the light is red and gray. There's spots of black, but that can be argued simply as the color of the sea. There is something like sound around me, but do antibodies make sounds when they kill viruses? Do viruses howl in pain and tug at heartstrings?

I float down, and there is the soul, a tiny spark in the battle royale that has been raging here since before I was a thought. I know because of carbon dating. Its color is bleeding out. Who knows how long it's been down here? Drifting, frantic, afraid, we have so much in common.

It's no longer a baby. I look into its face, despair etched into every line of its dark skin. _They look like my father_ , I think, and jealousy and fear swells.

 _They lost another, but how- the mother was right there, I saw her birthing them she was right there, who did this-_

Was this child a wish-fulfillment?

 _Wasn't the third enough, Mama? Wasn't the third and its screaming your name in my ears enough torture?_

The child just keeps staring at me, staring at a face that probably looked so much like it. I could see myself in its eyes, see myself and all the sickness in my heart, all the desires. It was too young to know all of these horrible things in me. And yet I thought it did.

"Why are you tugging me?"

A murmur, gibberish and frantic and natural for an infant, or anyone who had never heard Words. I move closer, It bobs, looking at me. I hold out my hands. It doesn't know how to reach. I touch the soul and the images swell. Some of them are mine and some of them are simply washes of color that tell me everything and _how is it doing that?_

Stupid question: the baby doesn't know it can't. It's not me, in the end. She has no idea what she's capable of, and the trenches warp even the most determined Soul.

She would survive better than me.

I'm starting to consider it alive, what is the matter with me?

I don't let go. I want to. I want to so much. Go back to the monotony, go back to the despair. Because now there is hope. If I just trade places, I can find a way. I can make this change. I can be born. I can _live._

 _I just have to dispose of her._

It's easy. She's already falling apart. She's already broken by this trench. Leaving her would do it. Leaving her she would fade and so would the tug and I'd forget. I'd be born and it wouldn't matter. None of it would matter.

I…

I can't let go. I'm crying again. I didn't cry when the boy disappeared. He didn't even have a name. I had gotten far enough to have ideas of one, even if it was a distant little syllable. Why am I crying now? I am a monster. I want to live. This is what monsters do.

I pull up my memories myself. I pull up the golden strands that are something like destiny. And they're tattered because gold is a fragile metal and they were already broken when I came here. I take them and find the tug, her tug. I need to stop doing this. I need to just leave, take my destiny and hers and go to the mother I really have wanted. Not the ill one, I'll will kill her with my love if I see her. That's just what happens.

But I can't. I place the gold in her Soul and the purple flares so softly. It warms beneath fake fingers. It warms and the tugging is a rope burn in my non-existent heart. I need to go back, go home. I press the Soul's hands into mine.

"Find them." My mind whirls with daydreams, images of things I knew from the residue of the universe. I had so many images and hopes, so many wants that had sunk into the bottom of me. Mi. "They will love you. They will cherish you. They will protect you. And they will hurt you. But forgive them."

I know that the words registered. I know they did because I am pulled away and she is screaming a word, my name. My name is her very first word.

I am an awful older sibling, I realize.

* * *

I float for a very long time. Pulled back with the strength of a loose anchor, I forget everything. For moments.

The guilt stamped in me is a constant.

And in a wash of pain, I remember again.

I'm being held. Frantic, weak, human arms in a cube I once created, tears of joy and soothing whispers. A snuffling next to me. Another body next to me.

I cry. The mother can barely hold me. What is her name? _What is your name?_

I realize dimly that something is very wrong. I don't know what it is, but I scream and scream anyway.

Something, a very old something, has latched onto us. It is seeping in, deeper, further, fire in my stomach. The other snuffling falls away. Where did she go? Was that a sister? Where did she go?

Where are we going?

My scream becomes a hiss. And I am aware of brand new things, of a man's voice. He sounds so weary and triumphant at the same time. He sounds like the heroes of stories I caught pieces of up in my (first) mother's womb.

If he is a hero, then I will be his villain. I draw the second mother close to me without any hands, I draw her closer until she cannot come to harm.

Then, with the intensity of the viruses of old, I rise up and strike.

* * *

 ** _A/N:_ ** Welp. I'm having fun. Are you having fun yet? Onix isn't. Please read and review!

Challenges: Prompts in Steps Step 4 prompt 1: gracious, Diversity Writing Challenge F39. Write about loneliness. Easter Egg Advent day 27. Write about hollowness, Valentine's to White Day Advent day 22. write about siblinghood, Ultimate Sleuth Challenge 0.1: write about a decision of any kind, and Advent Calendar 2016 day 18: write about misery.


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